With little space between the Las Vegas and Japanese Final Fantasy 'Fan Festival' events, Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida and Toshio "Foxclon" Murouchi set time aside this morning to announce the changes coming to Final Fantasy XIV in the months leading up to the Stormblood expansion. There's two major patches between now and then, so there's still a lot of content to go.
Patch 3.5 is scheduled to go live in January, with the second, closing chapter, planned for March - unless the developers go ahead with their plans to push the latter release date to help bridge the content gap between the final patch and the incoming expansion.
While saving in-game footage for the Japanese Fan Festival stream, we were given images of the new dungeons and bosses set to release in the new year. January's update will feature the closing chapter of the Warring Triad storyline that pays homage to the enemies of the same name from Final Fantasy VI. With Sephirot and Sophia already defeated, it'll be time to face off against the 'Demon' known as Zurvan.
Two new dungeons will be added - 'Baelsar's Wall' and 'Sohm Al (hard mode)' - with the former acting as a main story addition to ease us into the events of next year's Stormblood add-on. Closing the Shadow of Mach storyline comes 'Dun Scaith', the third 24-man raid instance to make into the 3.x patch series. There will be new reasons for crafters and gatherers to interact with NPCs and a massive update to the 'Diadem' which sent multiple groups of players off into the clouds on 'exploratory missions'.
Other than that, Chocobos will finally class as pets rather than companions, meaning you can expect to see a lot more chickens brawling giant monsters out in the field. PvP will continue to see updates - including the abolishment of Grand Company requirements - and cross-server play for when Party Finder groups just aren't filling up as quickly as you'd hope.
Overall, there's around 6 months left between the current 3.4 patch and the massive 4.0 expansion introduction. There's 2 major patches left to close any lose ends and open up the new Ala Mhigo storyline - but we'll have to wait a little longer to see much of the incoming content in action.
